AS10279 WCCL-AS

WCCL-AS is the network of West Carolina Communications, the operating arm of West Carolina Rural Telephone Cooperative — a member-owned rural telco in Abbeville, South Carolina that today sells fiber internet, phone and TV under the West Carolina / Upcountry Fiber brands.

What it's used for

It carries the cooperative's own subscribers. West Carolina was founded in 1952 to bring telephone service to Abbeville and McCormick counties and the Starr-Iva area of Anderson County, and has since built out fiber across Greenwood and Newberry counties and into Columbia County, Georgia. The AS is the single path those homes and businesses take to the rest of the internet.

Notable

This is an eyeball network, not a carrier. RIS sees 130 announced IPv4 prefixes carrying 33,280 addresses but only 4 observed BGP neighbours. That combination is the tell: a wholesale transit business of this address size would peer with hundreds of networks, because selling transit is peering. Four neighbours means a couple of upstreams and nothing else — the traffic pattern of an access provider buying connectivity, not selling it.

The prefix list is a mosaic of unrelated /24s (152.44.x, 206.74.x, 207.144.x, 204.116.x, 164.153.x, 64.53.x) — the normal residue of a 70-year-old telco that acquired address space in dribs over decades. Crucially, the sampled reverse DNS is first-party (152-44-28-5.static.wctel.net, 206.74.132.5.static.wctel.net), so the scattered blocks are genuinely operated by the holder rather than leased out to third parties. Untidy allocation history, not an address-broker.

Interesting

The static.wctel.net naming across sampled space is consistent with a cooperative that hands out static addresses freely — a habit inherited from the ILEC era, and one most large ISPs abandoned.